Somewhere along the continuum of black holes and dividing cells, televised moonlight and Sanskrit tattoos, Fagan makes a characteristic music out of the sufferings and strange comedy of the everyday grotesque and everyday irrational. This Echo Train reverberates with remnants of everything from souvenir T-shirts to ancient hymns while emerging into the jagged sound of its own present moment.
—Geoffrey O'Brien

Aaron Fagan's poems are perhaps best at what poetry itself is best at: taking the details of everyday life and finding something of philosophical significance. The way he does this—with some brutally beautiful sentences, incredible control of rhythm, and all those perfect final lines—is quirky enough that his writing is original and grounded enough that it always feels true.
—Matthew Welton

Evident [in Garage] is the self-mocking, saturnine temper of such precursors as Alan Dugan or even Howard Nemerov. These anti-lyrics and bedroom palinodes strive towards apt purposes: this poet so given to humble skepticism he still tries to believe that "each thing we make / Results from the wild permutations of love."
—Publisher's Weekly

Fagan's first book is vivid and aesthetically disturbing work. His promise is considerable because his originality should prove to be decisive.
—Harold Bloom

Plato wrote about the ‘old quarrel between philosophy and poetry.’ If the quarrel seemed old to Plato, to make it seem new requires some serious ingenuity. In his inventive book, Garage, Fagan seems to be the poet for the job. As much as Plato attacked poetry, he recognized something vital about a rhetorical stance made lyric; that vitality is sharply present in the questions and turns of thought in Garage. Fagan both considers the ‘laws’ of poetry and breaks them, a mix that has made for an excellent first book.—Idra Novey, The Believer

Like his debut collection, Garage, Aaron Fagan’s Echo Train is a short book of short poems. Its full page of epigraphs—from Jung, Joseph Campbell, and Hayden Carruth—makes it look like a child facing an adult on a see-saw. And yet, like a string-theorist positing extra dimensions, Fagan somehow evens the equation. With lines of roughly equal length, widespread enjambment rarely employed for obvious semantic effects, and a fondness for unexpected turns of phrase and grammar, the typical Fagan poem has a powerful forward flow, trailing whirlpools of complexity.—Paul Franz, ForeWord Reviews